Japanese Baseball Cards: Another Package From Ryan

Saturday, September 30, 2017

Another Package From Ryan

I got a package from Ryan in the mail today with all sorts of goodies - all the BBM and Epoch team sets for this year along with some other sets and singles. I'll be doing a bunch of posts based on what he sent me over the next week or so but I thought I'd start out with some singles.

For starters, Ryan found a bunch of Sports Card Magazine insert cards from 2008 for me. Issue #67 was published in January of that year and featured cards of three players who had changed teams over the winter. Ryan had sent me one of them in the last package he sent back in March and sent the other two with this package. The players were Takahiro Arai (who went from the Carp to the Tigers) and Kazuhisa Ishii (who went from the Swallows to the Lions):

SCM #93

SCM #94

Issue #69 was published in May of 2008. It contained five insert cards that celebrated events in the first month of the 2008 season. The cards were all labeled "a day of record". The events celebrated were Hayato Sakamoto of the Giants becoming the youngest player in Central League history to hit a grand slam (on April 6th), Tomoaki Kanemoto and Takahiro Arai of the Tigers getting their 2000th and 1000th career hit respectively in the same game (on April 12th), Yuki Karakawa of the Marines becoming the first pitcher born in the Heisei era to get a win (on April 26th), Shota Ohba of the Hawks throwing a complete game victory with 16 strikeouts and no walks (on April 5th) and Takeshi Yamasaki of the Eagles getting his 300th career home run (on April 3rd). (I'm not positive I've got the complete story of Karakawa and Ohba's events - I'm going off of Google translations of their Japanese wikipedia pages.)

SCM #98

SCM #99

SCM #100

SCM #101

SCM #102

From 1999 to 2002 BBM published a set called Preview to basically preview their "flagship" card set each year. Starting in 2000 they added a 12 card subset of the top draft pick for each NPB team. This eventually became so popular that they got rid of the rest of the set and expanded the draft pick subset to include all the draft picks - this is the Rookie Edition set BBM's been publishing every year since 2003. I have the complete 2001 and 2002 sets but I only have a handful of cards from the 2000 set. All I really wanted from that particular set though was the draft pick cards and Ryan picked them all up for me:

2000 BBM Preview #P121

2000 BBM Preview #P122

2000 BBM Preview #P123

2000 BBM Preview #P124

2000 BBM Preview #P125

2000 BBM Preview #P126

2000 BBM Preview #P127

2000 BBM Preview #P128

2000 BBM Preview #P129

2000 BBM Preview #P130

2000 BBM Preview #P131

2000 BBM Preview #P132

Ryan also found me another card from the baseball subset of the 2000 Upper Deck Japanese Olympic team set. The card is of Shunsuke Watanabe and it's significant because it's one of the few "pre-rookie" cards of an NPB player. Watanabe was playing for Kazusa Magic of the industrial leagues when he was named to the Olympic team. He was drafted by the Chiba Lotte Marines in the fall of 2000 so his first NPB cards are from 2001.